Kol explained that Janeway remained in a coma and would for several more hours as her neurons knitted back together and regained the capacity to once again transmit and receive messages from all parts of her nervous system. At the end of her recovery time, she would awaken.
“Will she return to normal or will there be residual effects—like personality changes or side effects of brain damage?” Chakotay asked.
“For the most part, Kathryn’s life will continue as it always has and she will continue as the person she is. She will be fully capable of commanding your ship. There will be no lingering physiological damage—” Kol hesitated.
“But?” the Doctor said.
“Becoming the conduit for the Fourteenth Tribe altered Kathryn at a molecular level. Such changes cannot be fully undone.”
Chakotay crossed his arms across his chest. “How will this molecular change affect her?”
“There will be times when her emotions will become erratic—when melancholia or anger will seize her and you won’t understand why. Her actions, from time to time, may seem atypical. Such occasions will be rare and may not be attributable to this trauma, but you will never know for certain.”
“Can this molecular disturbance be treated?” the Doctor asked.
Kol shook his head. “There is only one action you and every member of your crew must take to assure her ongoing recovery: She must never be told of what happened since Voyager entered Monorhan space. I have sealed those engrams so they can’t be accessed. You should wipe your computer database of all the specifics regarding her experience. All she need know is that Voyager encountered some unexpected difficulties when it went to study the binary. Otherwise, the consequences of her learning about this experience will undo all that I have done.”
“All right,” Chakotay said. “I’ll take care of it before she awakens. But while I believe most of the crew will be able to follow this order without a problem, I’m concerned about Naomi Wildman. She’s a child and can’t be expected to—”
Kol held up a hand. “Done. Her memories will be sealed as the captain’s have been. But there is another situation in need of fixing that will also affect Voyager. This region of space must be stabilized for the strings to return to normal.”
The Doctor, recalling what the journey into Monorhan space had been like, wondered how many more casualties of radiation sickness—or, worse, molecular destabilization—would end up in his sickbay before they would be well rid of this place.
“How will that impact Voyager?” Chakotay asked.
“Forever sealing Exosia to the Nacene and restoring normal space will alter the fabric of space-time. Consequently, what happened in this region will vanish from the timeline and will be replaced with thousands of years of history. The resultant spacetime fabric will be as if it has always been. Life will adapt it. Other civilizations will be aware of it and travel through it.
“What about the gash?” the Doctor said, fearing for his matrix.
“It will be sealed, as part of closing Exosia. The photonic energy that was lost, however, cannot be restored. There will be a void. A large one. Voyager may have to traverse it for months, perhaps years.”
“It will be easier than navigating Monorhan space,” Chakotay said. He extended a hand to Kol, who readily took it. “Thank you, I should say, for cleaning up the mess we made.”
Kol shook his head. “All this needed to happen. The Monorhan prophecies foretold this hundreds of years ago. For all the talk of choice and consequences, I’ve found the universe has a lot of self-correcting mechanisms that it employs to maintain balance.”
“Whatever the case may be, you restored Kathryn to us. For that, we will always be in your debt.” Chakotay bid goodbye to the Doctor and Kol and left the office, leaving the Doctor and Kol alone.
The Doctor’s gaze swept over Kol from head to toe. “You remind me of your father—”
“He’s part of me. His life became mine,” Kol said.
“But the earnestness—that’s your mother,” the Doctor chuckled. “You’re lucky to have met her.”
Sadness clouded Kol’s face. “She has yet to return from Exosia. Or if she has, she has not come to me.”
The Doctor touched Kol’s sleeve gently. He knew and understood Kol’s grief, having lost Kes not long ago. “Kes has always been an independent spirit. She’s had a different path from all of us. Be grateful for the time you had with her.”
Kol sighed. “Perhaps our paths—my mother’s and mine—will join again someday. For now, I must resume the work that I was born for. I am grateful for having known you, man of light.”
“And I you,” the Doctor said.
In a blink, Kol was gone.
Though it had only been days by the reckoning of the dimension where she had been born, Kes had missed the glory of her existence as energy and thought. In Exosia, she was reminded of that life and knew that she was eager to resume it. She had no regrets for joining with Lia to help Ocampa. But Lia deserved to at last find the peace she had never known in life. And Kes? She would resume the journey she had been on before the Light had called her.
The last of Vivia’s people had departed, leaving Kes alone with the strings. She had heard their music before in the light and color of nebulae, in the birth of a star, in the harmonies of the planets. To be this close and to feel it intoxicated her. She understood why the Nacene loved their existence here.
Kes sensed a change in the energy behind her; she felt hostility—fury. Reveal yourself.
A Nacene, in the form of a human with auburn hair, appeared before her, eyes narrowed. You betrayed us. You lured my kind away from Exosia. But I will not be denied what is rightfully mine.
The body that contained her—Lia’s body—convulsed. Kes doubled over, curling into a ball. Blood burned in her veins, the heat blistering her skin; her neurons seized, making it nearly impossible for Kes to wrest control of the body away from the vindictive creature. The Nacene had reached into the sub-cellular level of this body with the intention of destroying it. DNA strands unwound, malignant tumors grew on Lia’s lungs and organs.
Kes ordered the body to resist but discovered that being enclosed in flesh inhibited her ability to fight the Nacene and make repairs at the same time. Failing at either task would be disastrous. Separation from Lia was an option—for Kes. Without Kes’s strength, however, the body containing Lia’s weak life force would never be capable of leaving Exosia, a fate akin to damnation for the young general. Yet the Nacene could not be allowed to remain in Exosia. Q had made that clear.
Refusing to allow circumstances to defeat her, Kes struggled against the Nacene while simultaneously searching for Exosia’s boundaries. When she discovered that Kol had yet to close the gateway to the Outside, Kes made a desperate choice: she would first save Lia, though at cost to herself. Kes risked being trapped here. But to her mind, such a gamble was a small one to take in the face of such high stakes. Every moment she hesitated, the enraged Nacene gained an advantage. Sacrifice was required.
In the space of Lia’s breath, Kes fused threads of her own energy with Lia’s, shoring up the general with enough strength that Lia’s body could survive independent of Kes. She then separated her remaining energy from Lia’s body. When the separation was complete, Kes looked upon Lia, saw a shadow of herself in Lia’s eyes, and felt cleaved in two. The connection between them was indisputable: Lia felt Kes’s pain, her anger, and would share her memories. The reverse was also true. Kes hoped that she could contain this Nacene before the gateway closed; she could not foresee what the consequences would be for her other self should the dimensions separate them.
Gathering all of her strength, Kes expelled Lia out of the gateway and into the closest available place: the shuttle that Q had used to transport them to the Monorhan system. The vindictive creature would not find Lia there. For the time being, Lia would be safe. Kes turned her attention on the Nacene, who shrunk back from her. The gateway is still open. Depart or yo
u will be destroyed.
The Nacene attempted another attack, but Kes blocked it, throwing the energy back at the instigator.
I will never leave!
Then I will contain you, Kes informed her Nacene attacker. Kes had never relished destruction but she had made a promise to the child she had helped create—and to Q—that she would not break. This Nacene must be made to accept the consequences of her choices. Recalling the lessons she had learned about fusion from living in a star, Kes directed her energy at the Nacene, collapsing the creature’s subatomic structure one atom at a time. She remembered what happened to the Caretaker. She intended the same fate for this Nacene, though she found nothing but pain and anguish in the task. The Nacene would be destroyed and would be expelled from Exosia.
Kes sensed the gateway closing but she would not be rushed. One slip of concentration and she risked losing containment of the Nacene. No matter how worrisome it was, she could not allow the thought of her other self outside the gateway to distract her. She had to believe there was a plan, that if she chose rightly a way would be open to her.
A crackle of energy caused Kes to shiver.
“They just don’t seem to play nice do they?” Q said in Kes’s ear.
“Q—I’m trying to—work here.” Kes grunted from the effort of speaking aloud.
“Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just checking in. Seeing how things are going, but I can see that you have it all in hand.”
“Gateway—” Kes struggled to maintain control as the Nacene’s sporocystian plasma began collapsing.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. There’s a backdoor. Always is. One of the least-known truths of the universe: there’s always another way out. Take your time—you’ll find it.” He rubbed his hands together. “Well, my work is done. It’s been nice working with you, my dear. We should collaborate again sometime. Ta!” A flash and—
He was gone.
In spite of the strain she was under, Kes managed a smile. That Q. Quite a rogue. Her concerns about escaping before the gateway closed assuaged, Kes focused on the issues at hand.
Once this Nacene was destroyed, she would take its remains and carry them with her until she found the backdoor. On the outside, she could dispose of them properly, thus fulfilling her promise to rid Exosia of the Nacene. Another concern plagued her. The thought of her other self, vulnerable and alone on the other side, was not so easily solved. As long as she was in Exosia, Kes could do little but hope that an opportunity to set things right would be afforded her. Someday, Kes would be whole and Lia would be free.
In the meantime, she would live among the songs of the strings until she found her way home.
Kathryn Janeway sat up in her bed, examining the padd that Chakotay had given her containing the reports during the time she had been recovering from her injuries. He had been so calm during their briefing—even for Chakotay—that Kathryn felt like a fragile old lady: fussing over her pillows, asking not once, but three times if he could replicate something for her, contacting the Doctor at least one time during their conversation. One might have thought she’d nearly died, for all his solicitousness. She had to admit, though, that she took a small measure of pleasure from the attention. Knowing she mattered, knowing she was missed, made the lonely starship captain’s job a bit less isolating.
It felt strange, reading the reports, knowing that so much had happened around her and not having any memory or connection to those events. Who would have thought that a seemingly straightforward trip to explore a binary star system could go so awry? And the casualties! Janeway scanned the list of the injured and the dead: a tremendous price to pay for so little knowledge gained. A certain degree of danger was associated with any exploratory venture, but Janeway had begun to wonder if they’d tipped past equilibrium on the cost-benefit scale and the risks had finally begun to outweight the benefits. The question would have to wait to be answered until the next crisis, if then. Time for Voyager to get back to normal, which was to say abnormal—nothing about their lives on this ship was typical.
Take this void they were several days into. No one on the ship had ever experienced anything like it before. Always a new challenge! There was the question, however, of how many of these “challenges” were bad luck and circumstance and how many were the result of choices, primarily Kathryn’s choices as captain.
Kathryn rarely regretted her choices, believing that once a decision was made, there wasn’t much point in analyzing it to death, but in this case she admitted, if only to herself, that she may have made a mistake in taking this last detour.
She dropped the padd onto her lap with a sigh. So Voyager had survived another near disaster to continue on her way to the Alpha Quadrant. What now?
Most of the time, when she was recovering from a medical ailment, be it a nuisance infection or an injury, she couldn’t wait to get back to the bridge. The Doctor practically had to chain her to her bed. This time…she felt…disconnected, hollow.
Her door chime sounded.
“Enter.”
Neelix stepped through the door holding Naomi Wildman’s hand. Twisting free of his grip, she pattered across the floor toward the captain’s bedside, clutching a piece of paper against her chest.
“Commander Chakotay said you wouldn’t mind a visitor,” Neelix said cheerily.
“I have a present for you,” Naomi said, twisting her body from side to side.
“Since I’m not supposed to leave my bed, why don’t you bring it over and show me?” Kathryn asked, patting a spot on the blanket beside her.
The child looked at Neelix who encouraged her with a smile, and then scrambled up onto the bed.
Kathryn draped an arm around Naomi’s shoulders and squeezed her up close against her. Moments such as these were rare; Kathryn treasured them, especially since she had her doubts that she would ever have a child of her own, depending on how many decades their journey would take, never mind the odds of her being around nieces or nephews before they grew up. “So what do you have to show me?”
Naomi laid down a crayoned picture of at least seven or eight individuals, primarily in Starfleet uniforms. “This is me and my mom,” she said, pointing to a small figure with bright yellow hair who held the hand of a taller figure with bright blond hair and eyes fringed with straight line eyelashes. “And this is Neelix…” She went on to identify the members of the senior staff.
A figure at the center towered over the rest of the crew. Kathryn pointed this out. “I presume this is me.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding her head. “And I made you taller because you’re kind of like the mom to everyone else since all of their moms are far away in the Federation.”
Every once in a while, I need to be reminded that it isn’t just about the destination, it’s about the journey, she thought. “So I guess we’re a family?” Kathryn said.
“Yep. We are,” Naomi said. “Now let me tell you about the lesson I just had with the Doctor…”
Tom waited in the mess-hall line with the Delaney sisters, chatting casually about his Captain Proton holodeck project.
“So it’s in black-and-white? Is there something wrong with the buffers that you can’t project color?” Megan said.
“No,” Tom said, explaining for the fourth or fifth time today that the program was a homage to ancient Earth entertainment. If the blank expressions on Jenny and Megan’s faces were an indication, they didn’t quite get that part of it. Lieutenant Ayala finished getting his lunch and left for a table, placing Tom first in line.
“You had something for B’Elanna?” Tom asked. He had no intention of spending his first full day back on a stomachful of leola-root surprise.
“Of course! Right here! I made her some gagh soufflé. They say it strengthens the constitution.” Neelix passed over a plate with a jiggling, gelatinous mass of liver-colored goo set atop a flaky pie crust. “Tell her I hope she feels better.”
“Thanks, Neelix.” Tom began thinking about who owed him replicator
rations, because B’Elanna was definitely getting a pepperoni pizza. He was about to leave the line when a thought occurred. I wonder if anyone has told him about Kes. He paused in midstep and turned back to the Talaxian, leaping about the kitchen, humming a cheerful snippet.
Neelix must have noticed Tom’s confused expression, because he slid a pot off a burner and returned to the serving area. “Did you need anything else?”
He seemed so happy flitting from pot to pot, stirring this, tossing that. Sharing news about his long-lost love right now, especially since Tom didn’t know what happened to her after she went into Exosia, might not be the most thoughtful decision. Maybe this was one of those things that was better off left unsaid. At least by him and for the time being. Probably wasn’t his place. The Doctor would be a better resource anyway; he’d suggest it to the Doc during his next shift. There was enough gloom going around with relentless emptiness of the void ahead of them that Tom didn’t want to put a damper on Neelix’s mood. “Nah. It’s nothing. Thanks for the soufflé.”
Tom exited the mess hall and headed for the turbolift where he ran into Harry.
“Headed for my first shift since being back,” Harry said.
“Taking care of my girlfriend.” Tom pointed to the bloody glob on the plate. “Wait a sec—you might know what that’s like nowadays. You never told me how it went with q.”
Harry did a poor job of squelching a grin. “She was great the last time I saw her, but we broke it off. Decided to just be friends.”
“If it was great, why not continue a good thing? She could drop in,” Tom said. “Give us a little nudge toward the Alpha Quadrant from time to time.”
Harry blushed.
Tom raised an eyebrow. “Harry!”
“She got tired of having to resurrect me every time we, you know—” He blushed to the roots of his hair.
To Tom’s mind, there wasn’t a good comeback to Harry’s confession, and frankly, the visual kind of disturbed him. “Ah. Okay. Well. Have a great shift,” he said, and decided to take a different route to B’Elanna’s quarters.
String Theory, Book 3: Evolution Page 35